It will be remembered that when Jacobite Johnson was pensioned, the English language did not suffice to give expression to his feelings. He was obliged to borrow a word from France: he was pénétré with his Majesty’s goodness. In 1783,—weighing Stuart against Brunswick, Johnson borrowed a word from the same foreign source, to disparage the House of Hanover. It must be confessed that Dr. Johnson’s Jacobitism had become a ‘sentiment,’ in 1783. He could then indignantly denounce the factious opposition to Government, and yet account for it on Jacobite principles. He imputed it to the Revolution. One night, at Mrs. Thrale’s house in Argyle Street, where the conversation turned on this subject, ‘Sir,’ said he, in a low voice, having come nearer to me, while his old prejudices seemed to be fermenting in his mind, ‘the Hanoverian family is isolée here. They have no friends. Now, the Stuarts had friends who stuck by them so late as 1745. When the right of the king is not reverenced, there will not be reverence for those appointed by the king.’

BOSWELL, ON ALLEGIANCE.

In June of the following year, 1784, Johnson made a remark which very reasonably struck Boswell ‘a good deal.’—‘I never,’ said Johnson, ‘knew a Nonjuror who could reason.’ On which observation and on the position of the Nonjurors and their Jacobite allegiance, generally, Boswell makes this comment:—‘Surely, he did not mean to deny that faculty to many of their writers,—to Hickes, Brett, and other eminent divines of that persuasion, and did not recollect that the seven Bishops, so justly celebrated for their magnanimous resistance to arbitrary power, were yet Nonjurors to the new Government. The nonjuring clergy of Scotland, indeed, who, excepting a few, have lately, by a sudden stroke, cut off all ties of allegiance to the House of Stuart, and resolved to pray for our present lawful Sovereign by name, may be thought to have confirmed this remark; as it may be said that the divine, indefeasible, hereditary right which they professed to believe, if ever true, must be equally true still. Many of my readers will be surprised when I mention that Johnson assured me he had never in his life been in a nonjuring meeting-house.’—Johnson’s disrespect for the reasoning powers of the Nonjurors was still less intense than his detestation of the Whigs. Of some eminent man of the party, he allowed the ability, but he added, ‘Sir, he is a cursed Whig, a bottomless Whig, as they all are now.’

Walpole was satisfied that the Stuart race was effete, and that the family was incapable of exciting the smallest sensation in England. He could not, however, pass over an incident in ‘the other family.’

In allusion to the Prince of Wales and the Roman Catholic widow (of two husbands) whom he married,—Mrs. Fitzherbert, he says: 1786, ‘We have other guess matter to talk of in a higher and more flourishing race; and yet were rumour;—aye, much more than rumour, every voice in England—to be credited, the matter, somehow or other, reaches from London to Rome.’ Happily, no new ‘Pretender’ arose from this extraordinary union.

A JACOBITE ACTRESS.

In this year, in the month of July, the comedy of ‘The Provoked Husband’ was played at the Haymarket, ‘Lady Townley, by a Lady, her 1st appearance in London.’ The lady and the incident had some interest for those who held Jacobite principles. They knew she was the daughter of an old Scotch Jacobite, Watson, whose participation in the ’45 had perilled his life, ruined his fortune, and caused him to fly his country. He died in Jamaica. His widow returned to Europe, and brought up the family, creditably. In course of time; Miss Watson married a paper-manufacturer, or vendor, named Brooks. His early death compelled her to go on the stage; her success, fair in the metropolis, was more brilliant in Dublin, Edinburgh, and other important cities, especially where Jacobite sympathy was alive. It is curious that in Boswell’s account of the tour to the Hebrides with Johnson, under the date, September 7th, 1773, when they were at Sir Alexander Macdonald’s, at the farm of Corrichattachin, in Skye, among the things which he found in the house was ‘a mezzotinto of Mrs. Brooks, the actress, by some strange chance in Skye.’ The portrait, in 1773, was not that of an actress; nor was the lady then Mrs. Brooks; but that was her name, and such was her profession when Boswell published his Life of Dr. Johnson, in 1791; at which time, however, he was not aware of her Jacobite descent. Some persons, unpleasantly advanced in years, recollect old Mrs. Brooks’s powerful delineation of Meg Murdockson, in T. Dibdin’s ‘Heart of Mid Lothian,’ about the year 1820, at the Surrey Theatre, and they suggest that she was the old Jacobite’s daughter.

BURNS’S ‘DREAM.’

In the year in which the Jacobite’s daughter made her first appearance in London, as ‘Lady Townley,’ Burns wrote the verses which he called ‘A Dream,’ with this epigraph:—

Thoughts, words, and deeds the Statute blames with reason,